


A Matter of Occupancy

by FSTP



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical "Death", Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:14:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23866594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FSTP/pseuds/FSTP
Summary: Ghost Face has no home territory of his own, and his championship-level bridge-burning talents have left him without a place to stay until the next trial.He decides to tempt fate - or just a possible decapitation - by sneaking into the MacMillan estate.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 42





	A Matter of Occupancy

There was a … _problem_ with his life in the Entity’s realm. 

It wasn’t that he was ungrateful, except that he was. He appreciated being pulled in, being given free reign to stalk and kill and brutally slaughter a virtually endless number of people, even if it was the same people over and over again. He enjoyed it as much as he’d ever enjoyed anything in his life. Sure, it didn’t have the frisson of excitement that came from learning about someone’s whole life, stalking them for weeks on end until finally figuring out just the _perfect_ moment to shatter everything like a cannonball through a stained glass window, and then getting the chance to interview their grief-wracked loved ones to write a whole story about himself _without letting on it was him_ , but the lack of having to worry about police involvement made up for that a little. 

He liked it all, indulged in it whenever he was told, but the issue was that - 

In a word, he was homeless. 

Danny was intimately familiar with living out of a car or a motel or a cheap rental apartment. Staying in one place all the time would have made his skin crawl; even the idea of it got on his nerves. But whenever they weren’t in a trial, the Entity’s chosen all had somewhere to lurk. Some piece of the world they’d all left behind picked up and badly copied by a thing that couldn’t understand what it had taken to call _home_ , or at least _mine_. Out of all of them, Danny was the only one without that. 

\- well, no, that wasn’t true; he knew Leatherface didn’t have a place of his own either, the freak. But he’d gotten along well enough with the _other_ fuck-ugly chainsaw obsessor to make the Coldwind farm into something like a home, so as far as Danny was concerned, he didn’t count. 

No, it was only the Ghost Face who had to wander aimlessly around the frigid pockets of the Entity’s realm, trying to find a place to hunker down in until the next trial. Just like before. It grated on him. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially when trying to deal with an intellect so massive it came back around the other side into stupidity, so he constantly found himself having to improvise. 

The others had their places, their homes, their personal hideaways, and he was no stranger to invading those kind of spaces. He’d taken to … settling in. 

Some weren’t really an option. If the homeowner in question was too insane or too inhuman or just a little _too_ similar to him for total comfort, he left the place alone. He had to rotate where he stayed among the rest regularly; longer stays would have been nice, but he’d always been known for overstaying his welcome. 

His best bet was always Ormond. Legion had an entire ski lodge at their disposal, and they barely used any of it. Sure, it was cold as hell, but there were bedrooms with blankets and plenty of large windows, even if half of them were boarded up. And Legion themselves tended to put up with him better than some of the others. They didn’t _like_ him, he knew. But he liked to think they admired him. He was what they could have been, after all: feared and deadly and never, ever caught. 

But even they didn’t always put up with him for long. He didn’t really mind. As much fun as they were to poke and prod and drive into violence, there was always something slightly unsettling about talking to one of them and knowing the other three were right there, listening to everything he said. There was no privacy, talking to them. No secrecy. And no driving them apart, either. 

His most recent stay had ended when he made a pass at Julie, which made Frank run him out of the lodge at knifepoint. Violent and violently possessive, and even while he knew there was no chance some skinny little shit with a switchblade could ever lay a hand on _him_ he’d left without an argument, laughing the whole way. Things would cool down eventually. They’d let him back in. 

Unfortunately that left him wandering again. 

He considered where to go. It wasn’t a matter of the other killers _allowing_ him onto their property, but unlike the world he’d left behind, the people here had violent advantages and as bad a tendency to use them as he did. And while death wasn’t permanent for anybody should the unfortunate happen, they could still feel pain. Legion might not have been able to lay a finger on him, but some of the others … could. 

Anna might not be around, and even if she was, she might leave him be if he stayed out of sight. On the other hand, she was incredibly accurate with those axes, and he hadn’t exactly inspired any goodwill in her the last time she found him in her house. Maybe Glenvale - the saloon had empty rooms, and even alcohol, and Caleb understood the plight of a drifter. Though he also understood that Ghost Face was exactly the sort of person he used to hunt and kill for money, and the last time Danny had been there he’d made some … disparaging comments. 

None of it really appealed, until he reminded himself that there was always one other option. A dangerous one, dangerous enough that he’d generally ignored it. He’d seen it a few times, always from a distance; the area around it was huge, all the old buildings and machinery and even a few mine entrances surrounding it like a barrier. 

But at the center, the MacMillan estate had a house. It was an old-fashioned estate house, the kind the wealthiest of the 19th century lived in - and entertained in. It had to have all sorts of unoccupied rooms in it that its sole occupant never bothered to check. 

Until then he’d never really considered it. There were much easier places to get into, with much - well, _slightly_ \- more amenable people to deal with. But his bridges were on fire right now. It was his best option, and if he was right about what was inside, the most comfortable, too. 

He probably should have thought about the bear traps. 

Danny managed to avoid stepping into one with all the grace and care of a feather tied to a lead weight, and almost cracked his head on a tree just trying to keep himself upright. It was sitting in the shadow of a tree, a little darker than iron should have been, primed and ready, the teeth almost pitch black with dried blood and the jaws straining against the springs. He watched it for a few long seconds before scanning the area around him for any more, and saw another ten feet away, a little more obvious around the edge of a boulder. To catch anyone trying to sneak around it, he guessed. 

He felt the rage crawl up in him at nearly getting _trapped_ , but there was curiosity there, too. The Trapper trapped his own territory. Why? 

Danny knew the answer: because of people like him. 

It felt like a hand-delivered invitation to break in. 

There were more traps, scattered through the trees and darkness. He avoided all of them, moving carefully, tempted to set one off with a stray branch just to make sure Evan was distracted. But it might alert him, too, put him on edge, get him _looking around._ Not the best plan. No, Danny was going to sidle right in like the shadows the moon cast through the tall grass, and nobody would be the wiser until he was ready to make himself known. 

The area around the estate house was mostly devoid of trees, but not of traps. He kept himself low to the ground, both to avoid being seen and to make sure he didn’t make any more idiotic mistakes. There was no movement around the house, no signs of occupancy. There _was_ light in some of the windows, near what had to be the main entrance. He kept to the opposite side of the house, and made his way to a door that looked like it had been added to the house well after it was built. 

He pushed it open; it wasn’t locked. Now there were no more traps. No reason to risk stepping into one when the rest of the place was so forbidding that everyone would have the sense to stay the fuck away. Except him, of course. 

With the stealth he’d made himself known for, Danny made his way into the MacMillian estate, looking around at everything he could see. Cracked paint. Peeling wallpaper. Framed photographs so faded they were blank. Shattered floorboards and boarded-up windows. It probably looked fantastic at some point, before a maniac had let it fall into decay. 

Up ahead, he could see a half-open doorway leading to what was the front of the house. There was firelight coming from in there, spilling out into the hallway like the light of hell. He paused just beyond it and _listened_ , but other than the faint crackle of the flames and the sounds of the house settling, there was nothing to hear. No breathing. No snarling. No heavy footsteps and no pounding of metal. 

So - probably alone. Even better. _Don’t leave your shit unguarded, Evan._

Up a flight of stairs he found what he was looking for. Doors with functioning locks, and one or two of them even had beds in them. Shitty ones, broken and collapsed and looking like they’d been soaked through and taken fifteen years to dry out, but they were better than a pile of dry leaves under a tree. He picked through them, trying to find the least dilapidated, but the last door in the hall opened into a master bedroom. 

This one was a little more maintained. The walls were still peeling and the floorboards still looked like they were ready to collapse at the next hint someone might step on them, but the rug laying across the floor mostly looked moth-eaten, not completely destroyed, and the bed was in one piece, upright on its admittedly crumbling frame. 

He quietly shut the door behind him and stepped forward, leaning over the bed. There was a fine layer of dust on the covers, which meant it didn’t see much use, and when he tugged the top layer back an inch he could see brown-edged water stains on the sheet and pillow underneath. A glance upward showed him that the leak had been repaired, though probably not recently. 

So … Evan came in here, but not very often. It was clearly _his_ room; there wasn’t much to indicate a personality but if he’d thought enough to repair the ceiling, then it meant something to him. It was personal. It was _private._

Danny really had no other choice but to stay here. 

He sat on the bed cautiously; the springs creaked, but the frame held, and the whole room didn’t collapse under him. Emboldened, he brought his legs up, letting his feet land on top of the covers without bothering to take off his boots. Mud splattered across the hand-stitched cloth. There was a dangerous groan, but the bed still held; the springs were probably just rusted from years of disuse. 

It was as comfortable as he could ever remember being, at least in this place. Content in the darkness and the knowledge that there was no way Evan would suspect he was here, he let himself drift off. He hadn’t been able to lock the door - it was too old-fashioned, needed a key even from this side - but that didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be found. 

His fingers automatically found the sheathe strapped to his thigh and felt the hilt of his knife. No, he wouldn’t be found, but the Entity played mysterious and spiteful games, so it never hurt to be ready. 

Besides, old habits died hard. 

\--

What woke him wasn’t a sound or a flash of light against closed eyelids even through the mask. It was a sixth sense he’d developed over the years, one that warned him when he was getting into danger, when things were getting _too close._ It prickled along his skin, the back of his neck, a whisper in his mind whenever cops started showing up places he was going, when his coworkers’ muttered conversations stopped whenever he walked in the room, when people started asking leading questions. It had kept him out of trouble for years. 

It was screaming a warning now, a full-bore red alert, every inch of his body suddenly awake and alive with electricity. 

He didn’t even open his eyes, just rolled across the bed and off the other side; it spared him from getting cracked open and gutted like an oyster by a cleaver that had probably seen the insides of as many people as his own knife. He _heard_ it slice into the covers and the bed with a nasty ripping noise, though the sound his chest cavity would have made would have been nastier. Danny managed to land on his feet and scramble back in time to see the Trapper, all who-fucking-knew how many feet of him looming over the bed, jerking his cleaver free, sending feathers from the down cover into the air. 

The mask was fixed on his own. The pinpoint eyeholes that had always looked so stupid to him before were a lot more unsettling close up. He couldn’t see the eyes behind them, but where the mask cracked into a violent grin, he could just see lips pulled back into a grit-toothed snarl. 

It shouldn’t have been possible for him to get into the bedroom so easily - and without Danny _knowing._. He was huge, after all, all heavy muscle and chunks of metal lodged into his skin. The floorboards should have creaked. The _door_ should have creaked. Something should have alerted him, and the fact that it took up until he almost got bisected to get through to him was, to put it very lightly, a surprise. 

Danny’s mind moved faster than it ever had. There was only one way out of there, and that was the doorway on the opposite side of the bed - the same side as Evan was on. All the windows were boarded up, and the floor, despite his earlier suspicions, was proving itself as solid as concrete. He either had to talk his way out, fight his way out, or get thrown out, possibly in several pieces. 

“You’re trespassing,” growled Evan. 

“No, really?” said Danny, holding back his surprise at being addressed at all - Evan had always struck him as a man more inclined to dedicated murder over any kind of discussion. “I mean - are you surprised? That’s part of my stock-in-trade.” 

Evan shifted his grip on the cleaver, making it glint menacingly in what little moonlight made it through the boards over the windows. 

“I was just looking for a place to bunk down for a little while. Until the next trial. You’ve got plenty of rooms to spare.” 

“Not this one.” There was a steely edge to the anger in Evan’s voice. 

So he’d been right - this was _Evan’s_ room, in particular. He glanced at the mud on the bedspread, now speckled with white feathers. Possibly not his best idea, but the sheer rage he could all but see steaming off Evan made him grin under the mask. 

“So another one would have been fine?” 

“No. You’re not welcome here.” 

“Then why be specific?” Danny took a careful step to the side; Evan only watched him, mask turning slightly, casting new shadows on the cracking bone. “You can’t be using all of them. Be a pal.” 

“Find somewhere else.” 

“That’s a little easier said than done, hm?” He kept his steps idle, but certain of where each one landed; if he looked like he was just pacing for the hell of it, all the better. He was still only being watched, not followed. “I don’t have a place of my own. I didn’t get as lucky as you.” 

There was a moment of silence, and then he watched the hand around the cleaver’s handle tighten again, burned and bloody knuckles whitening briefly. 

“That’s your problem. I don’t allow guests.” 

“Is that so?” Danny folded his hands behind his back, fingers loosely intertwined on the off chance he had to grab his knife. “I’ve heard otherwise.” 

There was silence again, but it was a darker silence. More _intent._ Daring him to fill it. 

“I know Anna shows up sometimes. Stalks from her forest into yours. Does she get a pass for getting around all your traps, just like I did?” He slid the heel of a boot back against the edge of the carpet, feeling for any holes that might trip him up if he had to make a break for it. “Oh, and I _know_ Legion creeps up here. They told me. Let me guess - that’s why the traps are out.” 

No response again. Because he couldn’t find anything to say, or because he didn’t _have_ anything to say? It seemed unlikely he was waiting for Danny to incriminate himself, since there wasn’t much further he could dig that hole. 

“I can be decent company, you know. I’m a nice guy.” When he felt like being one. Being on the wrong end of a cleaver could definitely encourage that. “We could trade killing tips. I know you have some little, ah … _problems_ catching up to your prey. I could - ” 

The cleaver hit the post at the end of the bed too fast for him to see; he almost jumped at the sound. Splinters of wood scattered across the rug and floorboards. 

“Shut up.” 

For once, he did. The fingers of his right hand grazed his hip, ready to find the slit in his coat that let him reach his knife. 

Evan pulled the cleaver free with one tug and took a few meaningful steps around the edge of the bed, closer to Danny. That also put him directly between Danny and the only possibly escape route. 

“You trespassed. You broke in. You made yourself comfortable in _my_ home.” Now with any light from the hall at his back, Evan’s mask was just cold bone and shadows, no human features recognizable. It was probably the last thing a lot of survivors saw. The thought - the _comparison_ \- made his palms itch, fingers wanting to squeeze close into fists, preferably around the hilt of a knife. “I’ve got every reason to kill you.” 

“You might,” Danny agreed, digging his heels into the rug. “Except that our illustrious benefactor might not be _so_ interested in you gutting me when we’re on the same side. Hm?” He set an elbow in the opposite palm and tapped the chin of his mask like he was thinking. “It might not appreciate the extra effort of bringing me back.” 

“It doesn’t care,” said Evan, with the sort of rock-solid certainty that made Danny wonder if there was any individual brain left in that scarred, bald skull, or if the Entity had hollowed it out and replaced it with a watered-down copy of its own. “Besides, you’d deserve it.” 

“So you’d be fine cleaning all my blood out of your carpet?” He tapped the floorboards with a toe. “And these. You’d have to hurry. Blood’s a real bitch to get out of any kind of flooring. Makes you wonder if I’m really worth all the trouble.” 

And Evan was going to have to get _someone’s_ blood off the floors before this was over, he knew. Danny didn’t plan on letting it be him, but there was only so much he could do if Evan manged to get close enough. The cleaver had more of a reach than his knife did. 

“‘Bout as much as a survivor,” Evan sneered. 

Rage, hot and cold at the same time, held Danny perfectly still for a few seconds. Ice up his spine and fire in his gut, making the urge to lunge and _stab_ almost too powerful to resist. He was faster. He was better at knowing where a blade needed to go to bleed someone out like a pig. He could cross the room and have his knife up to the hilt in Evan’s mask, right where he’d left an open space for anyone to reach, before the idiot even thought to lift up an arm. 

There was a pressure around his arms, a sign of otherworldly restraint. 

Danny laughed. 

“Aw, that’s rude.” He forcibly kept his hands where they were, one clamped a little too tightly around his elbow, the other curled up by his mask. “This is _your home_ , after all, just like you said. You really want a memento of me hanging around forever? Unless you replace _everything_ , a little blood’s going to stay.” 

He heard a snort, and the cleaver lowered. The incandescent rage still had his skin burning under his coat, but it cooled a little at the sign of finding a weakness, or at least something to exploit. 

“All I gotta do is drag your ass out and gut you in the field.” 

“ _If_ you can get me out there without me slitting your throat,” Danny said brightly. He couldn’t see the expression on Evan’s face, but the tilt of his head said enough. 

“You couldn’t even get close enough to try,” was the response, and Evan brought up his cleaver, let the dull edge of the blade rest on his shoulder. 

It was as much an invitation as it was an opening. Danny lunged, a streak of black and white malice, his knife already out before he was halfway across the room. He kept low, swept to the side - _away_ from the arm holding the cleaver - and brought his knife up, feeling leather give way to flesh, feeling his knife dig in and _drag_. 

Unfortunately, it turned out there wasn’t just metal in his arms; the stuff was shot through the rest of Evan, too. 

His knife hit an unexpected bolt of iron and scored off it, throwing him off-balance for one second, which was one second too many. Danny slammed a foot back, stopped himself from spinning, and slashed again; he could already see blood. He could also see the cleaver coming straight at him. But he had, as he always did, the element of surprise, and it missed its mark when he jumped back. 

The pressure around his arms got tighter. He ignored it. Evan brushed a hand across the bloody wound in his side, the place where his leather coveralls had torn, and let out a huff of breath that - _might_ have been frustration, and _might_ have been a laugh. 

Either way, it wasn’t pain. But of course none of them hurt the same as a human. They _weren’t_ , after all. 

“I’d call that close enough.” Blood dripped down the blade of his knife, darkening it in an already-dark room. “You’re a little too slow to be taunting me.” 

“Didn’t reach my neck.” Evan reached up with his bloody hand and gestured across his throat. “Try again.” 

In his head, Danny let the anger crystallize, let it refract the light of his burning mind in new and twisted ways. It took a moment; he flicked his knife, spattering the floor with Evan’s own blood, and heaved a heavy and above all _fake_ sigh. 

“For a brain-damaged degenerate, you sure are hard to please,” he said, and as Evan brought up the cleaver again he darted forward. 

He was used to fighting in close quarters. Even when he crept up behind them, his previous victims hadn’t always been frozen in fear when he attacked; some of them fought back. Arms up, hands clawing at his mask and knife, running for their lives in a tiny, cramped house that was supposed to be a safe haven - he knew how to maneuver, how to duck and dodge and weave to avoid anything that might actually do damage to _him_ , no matter how superficial. And Evan had a massive cleaver. He didn’t have much space to swing it, much less hide his movements. 

And yet, somehow … Danny didn’t have it all his own way. Ducking out of the way of a cleaver blow and sticking the bastard should have sent Evan stumbling back, losing control, blade swinging frantically to keep the space in front of him open, but it didn’t. Every stab made him grunt, but not fall back; the most he did was take a single step to balance himself. Maybe a blow to the front … ? So far Danny had mostly managed to get sides, ribs, one to his hip that should have made standing a trial, and yet all that was in front of him was a solid wall of bloody, pissed-off muscle. 

A knife in the lungs would fix that. He dodged another swing, laughed at the total failure to so much as lay a finger on him, and feinted another strike. He _saw_ the cleaver shift to follow where he’d pretended to go, and went for the killing blow. 

He felt a hand catch the back of his hood. Evan’s free hand, the one he’d discounted completely, assuming someone compensating for so much with a blade like that would never use anything else. It tightened around the cloth, pulled the mask flush against his face. 

Danny only had time to think _oh, shit_ before Evan smashed his head into the wall. 

There wasn’t much padding under the hood. He’d never needed it before. The force of the aging wood against his skull rattled him, left him seeing flashing lights; a second slam made his vision black out for a second. The only reason he didn’t drop his knife was because his fingers were clenched so tightly around it not even the Entity could have pried it free. 

It did effectively end the fight, though, at least until he could get his feet back under him. He was mostly limp in Evan’s grip, partly to present an image of helplessness that would give him a moment to fight back, and partly because he wasn’t interested in another blow to the head. Too many and even _he_ wouldn’t be able to stay standing. 

“How dumb do you think I am?” Evan demanded. 

“Very,” Danny said without thinking, which got him that unwanted third blow. He groaned, feeling thoughts rattling around in his head like loose teeth. 

“Don’t think you’ll make that mistake again.” He saw the cleaver come up. The blade was a few inches from his mask. It was riddled with scratches, dents, and old blood. There was a threat to it completely different from the threat of his own knife, which was always clean and gleaming when it wasn’t buried up to the hilt in someone’s ribcage. 

“Guess we’ll see.” He laughed, weakly. The anger in him was still fresh and seething, but the imminent thought of getting run through kept a lid on it. 

“No,” said Evan, “we won’t.” The tip of the cleaver prodded at his mask, threatening to push it aside. 

“Oh? You think I won’t come back just because you knocked me around?” The words were very precise and carefully picked. His eyes were fixed on the blade, which was much too close for comfort. 

“Only if you’re as dumb as you think _I_ am.” Evan pulled Danny up a little, closer, the cleaver following him. He didn’t fight it. If he looked limp and pathetic, Evan wouldn’t notice the way every muscle in his body had started to tense, ready for the instant he was dropped. 

“And here I thought we were all on the same side,” he sighed. His toes just barely brushed the floor at this point. 

The tip of the cleaver pulled back as Evan dragged him closer. Behind the mask, in the shadows of the eyeholes, he could see a gleam - terrible, murderous, darkly familiar to what he saw in the mirror most mornings, back when there had _been_ mornings. 

“We do the same job,” Evan said. “Doesn’t mean I have to like you.” 

Danny’s fingers flexed around his knife. 

“The feeling’s mutual,” he said, in a tone as flat and cold as the moonlight coming in through the windows. 

His arm whipped up. The knife buried itself in Evan’s arm just below the elbow, sinking in as deep as he could force it. It hit bone, and he would have tried to push further, get _through_ it if it hadn’t been for the fact that his head was still ringing. The massive prick would have deserved the pain and the long, slow healing for what he’d done, but he had to satisfy himself with being dropped instead as the grip on his hood suddenly loosened. 

The cleaver swung toward him as Evan reeled back. Danny hit the floor in a crouch, yanking his knife free as he fell; the blade swung over his head and hit the wall, sending dust and splinters flying. He leaped up, hit Evan with all his weight and rammed his knife into the bastard’s chest, just above the collarbone where it could slide right up into his throat. Make him choke on the knife, on his own blood, make him _regret_ thinking he could ever lay a hand on Ghost Face, could ever even _threaten_ to take off the mask, had the fucking _balls_ to compare him to the meat they gutted non-stop - 

Evan grunted, staggered back, and hit the bed. The hand with the cleaver in it lashed out to catch him before he fell. Danny hung on, pulling the knife out, stabbing him again, this time straight through the ribs to try and puncture a lung; even for a massive freak like Evan, it couldn’t be that far of a reach. His arms ached from the pressure constricting around them, but it was a tiny pain, so easy to ignore. So easy to brush off and go right back to what he was doing. 

It was so easy to be hyper-focused in the moment of a kill. The only thing that mattered was watching the blood spurt out around his knife, seeing the fear and horror in his victim’s dying eyes. Right now all he could get was the blood. And Evan _bled_ , bled as easily as any human, as any survivor. 

He didn’t see the bastard’s free arm moving again, his peripheral vision just slightly blocked by the fact that both mask and hood had been shoved out of position when his head hit the wall. All he could see was the blood, the wounds, and the unmoving arm with the cleaver still gripped tight. 

He _felt_ the hand close around the back of his skull, fingers curling in his hood again. This time he didn’t have a second to think before Evan hurled him, one-handed, toward the doorway leading back to the hall. 

Danny hit the doorjamb and dropped out into the hallway. It knocked the wind out of him, but he still had his knife; it would have taken a crowbar to pry that free from his fingers at this point. He coughed, pushed himself onto his arms, glanced back into the dark bedroom to see Evan trying to get to his feet, but he was having some difficulty. There was blood everywhere, even splattered up onto the stained white of the mask. 

Forcing himself up, Danny laughed. A real laugh, sharp and nasty, not the friendly kind from before. There was no reason to play nice now. 

“You’re pathetic,” he wheezed, getting to his feet. “I’m supposed to think you’re dangerous? I’m supposed to be _afraid_ of you? What a fucking joke.” He ran a finger across the blade of his knife and flicked the blood onto the floor of the hall. 

Everything he’d heard had painted Evan as some kind of unstoppable nightmare, as if the Trapper was somehow a bigger monster than any of them, personally designed by the Entity to slaughter. And yet it had only taken Danny a few minutes to get a knife in him multiple times. He watched with dark glee as Evan had to force himself to a standing position, dripping blood all over the bedroom floor, his empty hand pressed to the wound closest to his throat. The mask was fixed on Danny’s own, and he could _feel_ the hatred burning between them. 

He slid his knife back into the sheathe and waved cheerfully. 

“I think I’ve had enough of you for now,” he said, as disdainfully as he could manage against the throbbing in his head. “Maybe next time I come looking for a place to stay you’ll remember this and be a little more generous, hm?” He turned on his heel. “Think I’ll go out the front this time. Enjoy the cleanup.” 

Evan had already been getting ready to follow him, so Danny stalked down the hall with a little more speed than he would have normally, finding the stairwell from before again and taking the steps two at a time. At the bottom was the door where firelight was still casting shadows on the floor. He pulled it open and strode through. 

What had once been a spacious entry room was now dark, dank, and mostly empty. There was a fireplace against one wall, the only light source in the room, and looking around he saw other boarded-up doors and half-broken walls. There was another hallway just past the door he’d come in, and a glance down it revealed a lot of bloody bootprints leading to an unblocked door that looked out of place. The floorboards ended before they reached it, and there was an extra lock on it. He took a mental note of it for the next time he dropped by. 

For now, though, he didn’t want to stick around. All of them could hurt, badly, but they also healed in a hurry, and now he had something to brag about - maybe Legion would let him back in if he promised to tell them about it. 

Danny made his way to the front door, opened it, and stepped out. 

He’d forgotten about the bear traps again. 

There was one right outside the door. His foot landed in it dead center; the jaws snapped shut and he almost dropped as fresh hot pain ripped up through his leg. Bloody fingers gripped the doorjamb tight enough to crack the wood, and he looked down, his whole brain frozen at the sight. 

Hah. Of course. He’d been asleep for a while, hadn’t he? Evan had probably found him and taken the time to trap every way out of the house before trying to cut him in half, just in case he got past the fucking prick. There were probably traps all around the side door he’d come in, and in every shadow on the porch that surrounded the place. He hadn’t even thought about it. Stupid. Unforgivably stupid. 

Danny crouched and wedged his fingers between the trap’s teeth, trying to pry it apart and free himself. It wouldn’t give. He grabbed his knife and jammed it into the trap instead, using that to lever the jaws open enough to try and pull his leg out. 

Behind him, he heard slow, heavy footsteps, the kind that should have alerted him to Evan’s approach when he was still asleep. They stopped a foot from his back. 

Danny half-turned and looked up at Evan. The empty-eyed, grinning mask stared back down at him, blood still dripping off his slashed clothing. He briefly considered going for the knee, but even if he managed that _and_ got out of the trap in time, he’d be limping his way across what was, in essence, a minefield. 

The cleaver came up. 

“Shit,” was all he managed to say before it came down again. 

\--

Evan didn’t actually wind up taking him apart, though it wasn’t much of a comfort. Once he’d satisfied himself with spreading as much of Danny’s blood as he could over the front porch of the estate house, he dragged Danny’s shredded body to the very edge of his territory and chucked him into the fog without a word. 

For once, Danny hadn’t said anything either, though that was partly because there was an open wound in his neck that had severed his vocal cords. It was healing, as were all the rest of the slashes, stabs, and nearly-severed limbs, but until then all he could do was choke on air that couldn’t reach his lungs. 

The fury was still there, twice as bright as before, incandescent but stifled, at least for the moment. He’d made his point, and so had Evan. He’d have to get the fucker back for this eventually, but in the meantime, he’d lay low. Recover. Let everything, including his clothes, stitch back up and put him back on the playing field. 

And then … he’d do what he was best at. Watching. Waiting. Figuring out routines. He’d have the house scouted out by the next time he needed to crash somewhere, and when he did, he’d fuck Evan up badly enough that the bastard would be preoccupied for hours while Danny took a nice long nap in the man’s own bed. 

It was probably too much to hope he’d be living with the constant paranoia that someone was coming for him. None of them were burdened with that kind of thing. It would sabotage their killing instincts. But maybe he could still be made to fear, even if it wasn’t until the last second, when he turned around and saw the knife. 

The thought calmed Danny down a little. The stalking, the tracking, the planning … a little thrill ran up what was left of his spine. It’d be just like the old days. Around here he was never out of his element, but it would be dangerously exciting again. The thrill of _consequences_ put a sweet edge on everything. He’d have to really put forth the effort if he wanted to pull it off without ending up in a pile of broken bones and shredded leather on the edge of a forest. Again. 

And at the end, there would be payoff - violent, brutal, unimaginable to anybody with a normal mind. It wouldn’t be permanent, but that was fine. It just meant he could do it again, and again, and again. Until that irreconcilable shithead finally learned what it meant to cross _him_. 

It took a while for things to heal up enough to the point where he could actually walk, but once they did, Danny snatched up his knife and stumbled off into the cold, misty darkness of the fog.


End file.
